by Brad Taylor
“You wanted me?”
“Yes. I need you to go to Flores and find a man named Cahill. He’s an American professor staying in a hotel in the town. Probably a flop-house. Don’t hurt him. Bring him back here with all of his equipment. Pay particular attention to any electronic items such as computers or GPS. I need him in the next forty-eight hours. Take my plane to the airfield at Santa Elena.”
Jake simply nodded and left the room. That was another reason Miguel liked him. He never asked questions. Given some guidance, he simply executed, unlike all of the other pipe-swingers he employed, who would ask a thousand questions to ensure they didn’t screw up. Jake was fire and forget, and just like a guided missile, once he locked on there was little that could be done to stop him.
17
In the fourth-floor conference room of the Old Executive Office Building, Harold Standish glared at Kurt Hale, infuriated. The man was arrogant to a fault. The Oversight Council meeting was winding up, and Standish had been stiff-armed on every question he had asked. It didn’t help his mood that nobody else on the council seemed to think Kurt was being insubordinate. In fact, most seemed to agree with him. Tall, at six feet six inches, Standish looked like a cross between Ichabod Crane and Christopher Plummer, with a head of close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and the sour disposition to match. At the official conclusion of the meeting, he closed his portfolio, stood up, and stalked out of the room before anyone could stop him.
He went down to his NSC office on the third floor, flew through the anteroom without addressing his secretary, and fell into his chair. Staring at his computer, he began to calm down. He was still, after all, a very powerful man. A political strategist of rare skill, he had risen from the trench warfare of American politics by mastering the art of manipulating information. He was the go-to guy when it came to playing dirty. By the time he was thirty, he was richer than he’d ever thought he would be. By the time he was forty, he was the undisputed master of political destruction. By the time he was forty-five, he was becoming aggravated at how he was treated. How could he be so rich, and yet still feel like the boy with the dirt between his toes, begging for scraps?
He vividly remembered the victory party for the previous president’s second term. He was celebrating with the rest of the campaign staff when the president-elect motioned for his top advisors to follow him into his suite. Standish, who had been standing in the group, went along as well. Once the doors closed he found everyone looking at him like he was a turd in a punch bowl. The silence was extremely uncomfortable. The president-elect finally broke it.
“Harold? Is there something I can do for you?”
“Sir? Uh… no. I thought you had asked me to come in here.”
“No, Harry, the campaign’s over. Your job’s done. We have real work to do now.” Standish vividly remembered the president’s patronizing smile. “If it wasn’t for you we wouldn’t even be having this meeting. I mean that.”
We have real work to do now. The words had hit Standish as hard as a physical slap. He had seen some of the advisors fighting to suppress a smirk. He left feeling a burning shame. He realized at that moment that money wasn’t the Holy Grail. Power was.
Standish began putting his talents to use getting a key to the doors of power. He had worked hand in hand with the same people who had smirked at him in that suite and he knew he was just as intelligent as they were. Someday he’d jam that smirk straight up their ass. He didn’t have the experience or backing to join the political fray, but there were other ways to get on the inside. When Payton Warren began his first run for president, Standish had eagerly signed on. Simultaneously, he began his research, looking for a position to which the president could appoint him, should he win. He found it in the National Security Council.
Created by the National Security Act of 1947, the same act that had created the Air Force, Central Intelligence Agency, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the NSC was designed to help the executive branch synchronize political and military affairs. What Standish found attractive was that the statute dictated who would be on the council by law, but, unlike other organizations such as the CIA and the DOD, it didn’t specify any congressional oversight. It was one of the most powerful entities in the U.S. government, but the legislative branch had no control over its activities. In effect, it served one man: the president. Outside of the members mandated by law, the president could appoint anyone to the council for anything. Perfect. Since its creation in 1947, Standish saw that the NSC had evolved into a byzantine organization that fluctuated every time administrations changed, making it hard to ascertain who was doing what — exactly what he needed.
He had read about the NSC under President Reagan, and had become fascinated at how a mere lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps named Oliver North, working as a junior staffer at the NSC, had managed to create a complete clandestine infrastructure and manipulate foreign policy on a grand scale. The fact that it had eventually unraveled, splashing into the history books as the Iran-Contra affair, did little to temper him. Clearly, the people involved weren’t his caliber.
He had worked hard on the president’s campaign, proving to be more indispensable than ever before, with his information critical in the political fight. After the election, he asked for and received an appointment as a do-nothing member of an inconsequential subcouncil on the NSC’s statutory Committee on Foreign Intelligence. He went to work, using his skills to build what he wanted. In three short years he had managed to create the Deputy Committee for Special Activities, and had slowly but surely been included in the mission planning for all covert operations. If it was a secret operation on foreign soil, he knew about it. And knowledge was something he knew how to use.
He had come a long way since that late-night meeting. The memory still made his face flush, but that would fade. Soon, it would be him asking people to leave the room.
Standish was startled out of his thoughts by a knock on his door, followed by the president’s national security advisor, Alexander Palmer, entering the room.
“Hey, Harold, you got a minute?”
Standish stood up and put on his kiss-ass face, wondering why his boss was here unannounced.
“Sure, sir. All the time you need. How can I help you?”
Palmer took a seat without being asked. “It’s about the Taskforce meeting we just left. Kurt has some concerns about your line of questioning, and frankly, so do I.”
That fucking crybaby, Standish thought, what did he say?
“Okay,” he said, waiting on Palmer to continue.
“I let you on the Oversight Council because it seemed to fit the office here, but your primary purpose is simply to absorb what’s said so you can see how it affects other activities going on. I don’t expect you to weigh in on any decisions.”
He picked up a paperweight off Standish’s desk and twirled it around in his hands. “The council is well versed on the ramifications of these types of things. It seemed as if you were questioning our judgment.”
Shit. I’m being frozen out. What did Kurt say? Still wearing a smile, Standish said, “Got it, sir. I just thought that Kurt and the council were being a little timid on everything. We have quite a few opportunities here that we could seize right now if we wanted. I don’t think the council understands how important—”
Palmer interrupted. “Look, I know you don’t have a lot of experience in government, and I see that as a good thing, but these activities are very, very, volatile. The combined experience of the council is probably over a hundred years dealing with national security issues. You have to trust that we know what we’re doing.”
Maybe that’s why nothing ever gets done, you pompous ass. You’ve worked so long inside the government you don’t even realize you’re a chickenshit. The entire council thinks that talking about doing something is the same as action.
“Sir, I meant absolutely no disrespect. I know I have less time in the government than other folks, but I have worked inside the NSC for t
he last three years. I’ve seen how things run. We seem to make more charts and briefings about doing something than actually doing something. I just think the Taskforce could be better utilized.”
Palmer replaced the paperweight and stood, indicating the meeting was over. “I hear you. Sometimes I think the same way, and admire your attitude, but you’ve only been on the Oversight Council for six months. Give it some time before you decide we’re all hand-wringers. See a few operations go down, then begin to contribute. Okay?”
“Sure. Yes. I don’t want to get a reputation as a know-it-all. I’ll sit back and watch for a while.”
“Good. That’s what I hoped you’d say. You’re a valuable contributor and I don’t want to lose you.”
Standish watched the door close, thinking, Valuable contributor, huh? Not yet, but I will be, you patronizing asshole. He had seen the sausage factory of decision-making by the inner circle of the U.S. government and determined it was a recipe for failure. What was needed was decisive action, without a bunch of quibbling from Congress, or, heaven forbid, from the great unwashed of the American electorate.
Since Al Qaeda had started this war in 2001, Standish had seen the U.S. take a daily beating on everything it did in its defense. The public just didn’t seem to understand that there was a threat. Christ, even global warming is seen as a bigger danger. After watching all of the timid, halfhearted measures employed by the United States, he was convinced that something more aggressive needed to occur, outside of the public eye. The Taskforce was the perfect tool for the job. If he could get control of the Taskforce, the nation could get serious about terrorism. He couldn’t order around the CIA or the military, but he could definitely find a use for an organization that had no official affiliation with the U.S. government. Shit, even Ollie North could do that.
18
The Arabs had retired to Miguel’s guesthouse and were embroiled in a heated conversation. Far from being ignorant, both had spent countless hours with a Rosetta Stone Spanish software program in preparation for this trip. While they couldn’t pass as natives, they were now fairly fluent — something they had kept hidden from their host.
The shorter of the two went by the kunya of Abu Sayyidd, after Sayyidd Qutb, the Egyptian member of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose rabid proselytizing and interpretation of the Quran were, before his execution in 1966, milestones in future Islamic fundamentalist thinking.
The taller one, and the one who had done all the talking earlier, went by the kunya of Abu Bakr, after the first caliph who ruled following Muhammad’s death, and the first caliph leading to the split between Shia and Sunni.
Ordinarily a kunya is a nickname meaning “the father of,” as in Abu Abdullah meaning “the father of Abdullah,” and is commonly used in Arabic countries. In actual practice it’s a method for fanatics wanted by authorities to take an alias with a hidden meaning. The naming conventions in Arabic countries made it very hard to keep track of individuals, as a person’s recorded name could be any variation of full name or kunya.
Unlike their heroes of 9/11, neither Bakr nor Sayyidd had been radicalized in modern Europe, where Mohammed Atta and his ilk were treated as inferior beings and outsiders, leading them to turn inward toward Islam. Abu Sayyidd and Abu Bakr heard the calling from the mosques in their own home towns in Saudi Arabia, a radical influence unstemmed by the ruling House of Al Saud because of the simple fact that the threat led outside the kingdom, and thus was something to be encouraged no matter how much the United States protested.
In the Saudi government’s thinking, if the radicals were given something greater to hate than the ruling class, so much the better. Not to mention that many in the ruling class sympathized with the cause anyway. Let the radicals leave the kingdom and get killed. It was a win-win situation.
Like many of the men who had made the trek to Iraq, Abu Bakr and Abu Sayyidd didn’t start out as rabid ideologues. They were simply looking for a little adventure in support of a worthy cause. Their plan was to go to Iraq, fulfill their romantic notion of the fight to support Islam for a few months, and then return to their life in Saudi Arabia, working a normal job and telling stories of their heroic actions to their grandkids years later.
The naïve illusion of jihad was broken quickly. Most actions were accomplished by snipers shooting their targets in the back, improvised explosive devices hidden in the dark of night, or suicide missions that left dozens dead and dozens more brutally mangled with little discrimination between the infidel and the believer. One walk through the bloody devastation of a suicide bomber was enough to take away any idealistic notions of jihad.
Abu Bakr and Abu Sayyidd were lucky in that they weren’t chosen for a suicide “martyr” mission. At the time, the terrorist pipeline had enough shahid, and thus they were allowed to fight, with IEDs and rifles. Once they had killed, their mindset began to change. They had to justify within themselves the murders they committed, and their psyche simply couldn’t accept that they had done wrong. The answer was simple: The cause was just, no matter what reality they saw on the ground that refuted the propaganda.
Sayyidd and Bakr, like many other radicalized fighters, had become nothing more than weapons of the most dangerous kind. Literal smart-bombs. Living, breathing, thinking weapons willing to trade their lives for their nihilistic goals, without any moral restraint remaining against taking innocent life. Had they the means, they would slaughter their enemies on a massive scale. The leadership of Al Qaeda had striven mightily to obtain such a capability. Sayyidd believed he may have found it in the story told by the native boy. All he had to do was convince Bakr.
19
Inside his fleabag hotel, the professor twitched at every noise he heard in the hallway outside, wondering how long he had before he was arrested. He couldn’t believe the debacle that had occurred. The Mayans had come out of the darkness one by one, chopped to ribbons. So far only eight of the twelve original members had made it home. Counting Olmec, he could be looking at charges of man-slaughter or murder of four people. He regretted the deaths, he truly did, but the real shame was that no one would care that he was correct about his theory.
After spending the night by himself, it had taken him a full day to get out, and that was mainly due to his GPS. Without it, he’d probably be trying to suck water out of vines right now. He had hotfooted it to Flores, a small town on an island in the Petén province, with access to the airport at Santa Elena. At fifty-eight, he was weary down to the center of his bones, and wanted nothing more than to return to his calm life in Charleston. He hoped that the news of the travesty wouldn’t make it to this town before he could catch a plane out. Meanwhile, to keep his mind off his impending doom, he collated his information on the temple. Maybe, just maybe, he could get out of this alive and return with a real expedition of scientists.
As he always did, he maintained his level of secrecy, only this time he wanted to get all traces of the location of the temple out of his immediate possession. He downloaded the waypoint data and tracks from the GPS to his computer. Then he wiped the memory of the GPS so that it showed no trace of where he had been. He opened his laptop and booted up a very powerful encryption program by means of a sequence of keystrokes. The program itself couldn’t be found by a cursory examination. He pulled the drop-down menu and selected the steganography feature.
The professor had first heard of steganography, or the hiding of messages in otherwise innocent carriers such as pictures or letters, while still an undergraduate student. He had read about the ancient Greeks, where Herodotus tells of hiding a message of Xerxes’ planned invasion underneath the wax of a writing tablet to avoid scrutiny, and the legends of the pirates, where the head of a man was shaved and tattooed with a treasure map that was concealed when the hair grew back.
Later on, while on a dig with a savvy undergraduate of his own, he had been shown the modern usage of the technique. Every computer file, such as JPEG, MP3, or WAV, has unused data streams within itself, basicall
y empty pockets that serve no purpose. The steganography program simply fills up this empty space with the data that one wishes to hide. Thus, while the picture of Aunt Sally still looks like a picture of Aunt Sally, someone who knows there is hidden information within the picture can extract and reconstruct it.
After the program booted up, the professor was asked what he wanted as his carrier file, or the file that would hide the data. He selected three MP3 songs from his hard drive. When asked what he wanted to hide, he selected the GPS data. He continued by selecting AES 256 encryption and the password key. Now, even if the data were to be separated from the songs, it would be encrypted in an algorithm that had never been cracked, and thus would be secure.
In thirty seconds it was done. He was asked if he wanted to create a physical key, and selected “yes.” When prompted, he put a blank thumb drive in the USB port and the computer churned for a few more seconds.
He now had his data securely encrypted and could extract the data both virtually with a password on his computer, which held the steganography program, and physically by inserting the thumb drive into whatever computer held the carrier file, regardless of whether that computer contained the stego program or not. Once the thumb drive registered, it would self-extract the data.
The professor plugged in the phone line and dialed the closest ISP given to him by the front desk. It never failed to amaze him how far and deep the Internet had penetrated. It seemed like it was in more places than indoor plumbing. Once he was connected, he logged onto Hotmail.com and pulled up his account. He typed a short note and e-mailed the songs to his niece in Charleston, South Carolina. Jennifer was an anthropology student, so it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that she would appreciate the local Mayan music. Still, even if she thought it a little odd, she’d have no idea the information she was helping her uncle to hide.